google transit, unplugged

Google Transit has announced a revised look to their transit layer, as it appears in Google Maps. The key difference is that lines will no longer block the view of streetnames and other landmarks, making the map easier to read. I also notice that they've dropped the yellow-highlighting of certain streets on the basemap, which usually means an arterial street designed for cars. Largely useless state highway symbols have also been removed. The overall effect is much more subdued, which I like. It's like walking out of a hard rock concert, ears still ringing, and hearing a solo acoustic guitar in the subway.

Running Google Transit must be a lot like, well, running a big transit system: Your customer experiences your product at a level of detail that you mostly don't have time to look at. So there's a constant disjunction between your big management decisions and the customer's experience. Clearly, too, below a certain level of still-significant detail, Google must scramble to keep up with an endless flood of corrections. In just a few minutes casual wandering I found that Google seems to have mislaid Portland's Hollywood light rail station, for example. If there are errors at that scale then the issues at finer scales must be infinite, even fractal.

Still, I'm a fan. Someday, Google may even take the lead at Frequent Network mapping. They already have the data, and I'd be happy to help!

I wish so transit authorities feed their data to Openstreetmap. Many transit fans did already a lot of work and resuls are quite impressive - see ÖPNV-Karte or OSM Transport (zoom in to see it!). If they fed it automatically, that would allow to inter-link these maps with schedules systems (like powerful Czech IDOS) to find & highlight trips or just to show actual departures from selected stop and of course to make frequent-service lines more prominent.

Google Transit is dependent on the input from the transit system. In some ways this makes their job easier...it's not their responsibility to handle the flood of corrections. In another way, it makes it harder. They have to rely upon (overburdened, unsophisticated) transit agencies to update their own data.